ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION
ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION
On-Demand Information Exchange for
Extended Enterprises
Kluwer Academic Publishers
New York/Boston/Dordrecht/London/Moscow
Dedication
This book is dedicated to our
families
Contents
Dedication
v
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
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Foundations
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A General Model
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The Core Logic of the Two-Stage Collaboration Model Error! Bookmark
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The Architectural Components of the Two-Stage Collaboration Model
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The Implementation of the Two-Stage Collaboration Model
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Where Do We Stand?
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Appendix
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References
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Index
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Preface
Global supply chain is a fact of life in today’s world. From the
perspective of the First World, this practice reigns in outsourcing of jobs
that, in the view of many, threatens a way of life. This argument actually
implies that outsourcing represents a fair chance for the Third World to catch
up and reverse-leverage through market economy. However, many in the
Third World are also opposed to the global market economy from an
opposite argument. The fact that matters is, of course, that globalization
continues to progress relentlessly in its own momentum, and that the
national playing grounds continue to level globally for both Worlds. Would
globalization results in the rich nations getting richer and the poor poorer; or
would it help the world united in the same economical reason?
The questions that we the researchers could try to answer are a
different kind, the kind that leads to the understanding of the elements of
“the fittest” in the global competition. For instance, what defines an
enterprise’s staying power on the top of the food chain, or an economy’s
ability to design and control the global supply chains, in the long term?
Evidently, to understand this ability the field needs to study the engineering
prowess required, as much as the finance and management if the history of
industrial revolution is any guide. Yet, the study on the engineering of global
supply chains has been largely lacking. Traditional enterprise system
engineering methods and information technology do not automatically scale
up to the massively extended enterprises that global supply chains entail. As
a prime example, from the perspective of this book, the problem is illustrated
in the limited practice of real-time information exchange across the supply
chain – i.e., the field lacks some key elements to enable an enterprise drilling
through all tiers of suppliers to coordinate the global schedules. Without this
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ability, supply chain management would have to rely on managerial control,
which is inherently off-line and limited by the manual span of control.
We set out to develop real-time information exchange for massively
extended enterprises in the book. Our work started with a simple question:
Why the traditional results for global query of autonomous databases do not
work sufficiently for supply chains? To answer the question, we draw
heavily from our past work on information integration in manufacturing
enterprises; that is, we examine the requirements of supply chains in the
context of the evolution of enterprise integration, with an ever expanding
scale and scope. In this context, we examined the limits of the previous
Global Database Query results and the promises of the new extended
enterprise approaches, especially the software agent-based methods and the
market-style resource allocation models. We realized that the key issues
include the independence of the participating databases in the participating
enterprises of the supply chains; and that this issue logically extends the
previous paradigm of enterprise integration into a new one of enterprises
collaboration. The previous paradigm is proven in manufacturing, while the
new one is promising for supply chain integration (and indeed, for that
matter, in any other similar domains of enterprises collaboration).
It follows, then, that we can formulate a new model which retains
the traditional Global Query results, along with their proven promises, to
address the new domain for what they can and do best, and devise new
attending methods to handle the rest in a synergistic manner. This approach
leads to a Two-Stage Collaboration Model, where the first stage, which is
new, matches the independent databases for their information provisions and
requests in a market-style design, while the second, which is based on
proven results, processes the matched, resultant global queries.
The new solution allows enterprises to safely contribute their
production databases to collaboration, such as in a supply chain information
exchange regime, without having to succumb to an intrusive control model,
which has traditionally inhibited the enterprise databases from participating
in the collaboration. The solution also supports enterprises to contribute
multiple images or personalities of their databases to multiple concurrent
collaborating endeavors, as well as to only one. This property attends to the
many-to-many relationship between suppliers and supply chains – i.e., the
fact that suppliers often sell to more than one buyer or prime. These results
distinguish the new model in the field.
In a more general sense, beyond supply chain per se, the new model
provides a high-level concept where information owners and seekers
collaborate in an economic market to exchange information and facilitate
each others’ enterprises. The economic paradigm allows participants to
choose with whom to trade, and to also define the terms of the
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transaction. Accordingly, databases denoted as data providers will not only
publish the resources to be shared, but in contrast to traditional global query
solutions, also proactively select data subscribers that are looking for
information that the databases contain. The economic market works towards
self-allocation or self-regulation of resources for optimal global utilization.
In the general context, the present work holds promises for application
domains that employ database query-level information fusion and ondemand exchange of information resources.
In summary, the book analyzes the evolution of Enterprise
Integration from the perspective of the Two-Stage Collaboration Model, and
reviews the related results in the literature. Supply chain integration provides
a context for these discussions. A general agent-based conceptual model is
then developed to usher in the main result of the book. On this basis, the rest
of the book is devoted to the complete development of the Two-Stage
Collaboration Model. The first stage is analytically justified on its
computing performance and unique properties, vis-à-vis the previous results
in the fields of matchmaking and global database query. A prototype and
laboratory testing are also included to illustrate the technical feasibility and
soundness of the new model.
The book is based on David’s unpublished dissertation at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, with substantive revision and
extension.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Professor Gilbert Babin of the HEC, Montréal, whose
technical insight made the results on information matching possible. We also wish to thank the
other members of David’s doctoral committee, who served along with Cheng: Professors William
Wallace, Mark Embrechts, and Christopher Carothers, for their assistance to David’s dissertation.
Finally, we wish to thank the publisher, Mr. Gary Folven, and the reviewers of the book and the
series editors for their recommendation and approval to publish this book.